photo by Alicia Gaspar de Alba

Colonia Puerto de Anapra

"... Ivon found herself in a new development behind the industrial park, Campos Eliseos, it said on the brightly lit billboard up ahead, The Elysian Fields. A clone of the Champs d'Elysée arch had been erected at the entrance to the development on Victor Hugo Street, and behind that were streets called Versailles and Concorde and Saint Germain...A tree-lined park ran the length of Elysian Fields Boulevard...She noticed the yellow warning signs ... that prohibited digging in the ground or building fires, a skull-and-bones image to warn off those who couldn't read that this verdant oasis was not a safe place for picnics or barbecues."
--from Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, pp. 269-270

photo by Andy Baca

Smelter Cemetery with Cristo Rey in the background

"Over here's where they found some of the bodies," [Father Francis] announced as they passed a section of trash-covered dunes. "Lomas de Poleo, Pollen Hills, they call it. A couple of little boys found a human skull buried in the trash they were sorting. Police found the bodies of twelve women here and the remains of several others." ...The irony stung Ivon like a rock on the cheek. Water for Puerto de Anapra, the sign back there had said. A port without water. Not even the Rio Grande came to this godforsaken place."
--from Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, p. 38

photo by Alicia Gaspar de Alba

Elysian Fields Park in Juarez

"Nobody guarded Smelter Cemetery. Not even ghosts...The truck lights bounced off the tombs. Piles of stones and crucifixes populated the little graveyard. The ground was covered with mounds of thick black soot, and the chemical fumes were so strong they made her eyes water. Here and there plastic flowers and green scrub brush broke through the black ground...Just below the cemetery, she could see the billboards off I-10, and beyond that, the lights of West El Paso...Now the tires were crunching down the loose asphalt away from the cemetery. In the moonlight, the refinery smokestacks stood like sentinels of death."
--from Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, pp. 294-295

All quotations copyrighted by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, 2005.